Thursday, February 22, 2007

The room

My dear Katharina

The clear evening has a light that shines but doesn't talk at all, it's seemly a picture of our earthly life from a vantage point in the universe that happens or unfolds in the instant just before the redemption. If you would share this scene with me, you would understand it makes the perfect painting, the most beautiful painting you could ever think of because it presents everything we've talked about without representing anything at all.

It's a very everyday scene which takes place right before love, right before creation as in the Biblical sense, a story of origins. The place isn't spectacular or evocative, but it is a house like one of those in which you and me have never lived, everything seems to be comfortably in place as though arranged by the conspicuous hand of a motherly care or at least of guilt it comes with. The room could be anybody else's but it's not and that's the source of the amazing mystery.

Yet this is only the sketch, the preambule before the real ecsatic thread. It was a dinner, similar to the Last Supper in a way yet not quite the same. It was in a present tense so absolute that language had been rapturedly taken away from me and I could only speak little "talk" about anything that comes to mind. An instant soup very different from the ambar we had in my provisorium, rather chalky and smooth but so uncannily "homely". Then a perfectly fried omelette (and remember Agnes' dictum: "it's better not to smash the omelette") and fresh cut vegetables on a plate. Everything dressed with a transparent distancing and hiding, no honest dishes or glasses of wine, everything furnished with plain water and some brief moments of silence together with an almost whispered conversation without any other-worldly meaning at all. Nothing heavy, as it were the day when Tereza and Thomas died and right before Tomas' son would think that his father wanted the kingdom of God on earth.

It's so different from our hotel freedoms and storage houses. But there's very little feeling and perhaps me being uncomfortable about it is what makes sense of it all because in a way I'm so totally unexpecting that if the painting wouldn't be complete at all I wouldn't be disappointed in anyway. I sit on the floor as though untimely mourning before my time and write non sense in my journal with the hope of understanding myself a little better but the air is charged with a smell of distraction directed toward the man in question that can only prove a rather dietetic form of confusion.

But somehow I insist this is the sight of our earthly life in the minute before the redemption that keeps the Messiah from coming everytime anew. In a way I'd like to escape very much and meet you again for the same reasons as before but in a way not. In a way I want to be drunk from this nearing that distances reality so much, at least as we know it: in the most extreme possibility of the consumption. This is perhaps the only form of life where the chair of the Messiah can remain always empty, because it's so terribly abstracted from itself and from anything else that I find myself at odds trying to describe the violent and loving feeling of philosophy coming home I feel right now, because I know it's only one another departure that leaves the finite in order to know itself and to lose itself to be more precise.

Somehow this is not boring because it feels me with terrible fear, the fear of the known and the found. Yet the time is already broken to start with, because no events can be perceived by the searching eye until they crash with the eye itself in a repair that resembles already their passing away more than their coming into being. It's not called happiness or a Hegelian reconciliation, maybe the genius of Augustine would be able to find the contradiction that allows one to lie and hide all the truth away from the world, lest we risk that it shall be found in its barest nudity and then somehow no one would want anything from this world as it is. Then painting and thinking would make no sense at all, there would be no possible creation history and therefore no possible freedom and in turn modernity would pass from being an illusion into becoming the foundation of all possible world, a Christian vale of tears. Which it is at the same time, only that from our searching eye it is the tear what keeps the redemption always a minute late, what makes this world possible at all.

Suddenly I cease to think about my death and without altogether embracing my life or myself to life I can keep myself a minute away from my death so that if it would reach me, no one could say death found me in the wrong moment as in the story of King David in the Talmud. That moment of death, always untimely should be the only turning point in which the actual transformation can take place and "happen" properly. Otherwise we're condemned to this kind of everyday life that shines next to Gillel's knowing smile, and because we have a very extreme kind of freedom we can hardly experience it. It's different because as Agnes said in regard to Genesis, the philosophical grief starts as soon as you discover the time and in using the language you've lost the time again forever. The painting is perfect, that's why it cannot be happy. Oh untimely disappointment, sweeter than death and fresher than bay leaves, continuous revolt and revolution. Yet alive, for the time being. Departure time, rapture time, impossible time.

Ari

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